


Fish in a Barrel

by Gileonnen



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: And They All Died Happily Ever After, Cannon Fodder, Duplicitous Landscapes, Finnick Odair in His Underwear, Gen, Original Characters - Freeform, Redwood Trees, Second Person Present Tense, Smile Pretty for the Cameras, Survival Stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-23
Updated: 2010-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-14 00:40:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You've trained your whole life for this moment: The moment when you rise into the arena and cheat the odds. The Sixty-Fifth Hunger Games are about to begin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fish in a Barrel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [puella_nerdii](https://archiveofourown.org/users/puella_nerdii/gifts).



> Beta-read by the lovely [La Reine Noire](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lareinenoire/pseuds/La%20Reine%20Noire).

You rise into the arena, blinking hard against the sunlight. Your feet shift anxiously on the circle as you take in the placement of your opponents, the massive evergreens and the ferns carpeting the forest floor, the gaping mouth of the golden Cornucopia. The mouth is pointed toward you, which will make things easier; _Wind's in your favor_ , your grandmother might have said approvingly. _But even if it isn't, you can tack._

You've trained your whole life for this. "Career," they call people like you, as though you've never done anything with yourself except prepare to kill people. As though you can't weave a net or bake grain into bread or gut a fish as well as a man--but Agrippa wants you to step into that role, the way you've stepped into the role of the adolescent Adonis with the sea in his eyes. _The Career tributes always form a gang,_ Mags told you, on the first day of training, and you know better than to ignore Mags. _For at least the first day, you want to be in that gang. Then get out while you can._

Twenty feet from the Cornucopia, you can make out a familiar bundle that you know from the kitchens that serve the Capitol. It will be full of cooking knives--slender boning knives and fillet knives with wickedly curved blades. You can snatch that up on your way in, and you'll have a knife ready to fight off the hollow-eyed kids from Twelve and the quick-fingered boy from Three as you grapple for the spears.

( _But not too many kills_ , you remind yourself. Not at first. Mags told you to present yourself as middle-of-the-pack: too useful to kill immediately but not dangerous enough to destroy at once.)

The wind stirs your hair, and it tastes faintly of salt and sulfur. That home-taste makes you smile despite yourself, but you turn it into the smile that Agrippa has made you practice. _Sexy but completely innocent_ , he calls it. The kind of smile that incites not only desire, but guilt--because when people only desire you, they hate you for not returning it; when they hate themselves for desiring you, they want to give you the world.

You need the world, right now. Or at least a decent fucking spear.

Then the gong is ringing, and you sprint toward the Cornucopia, snatching up the bundle of knives as you pass it. You draw a boning knife out by the handle and ram the blade into Three's throat as you go; only a brief distraction, but still it slows you enough that you have to slice up Emerald's pretty face to claim the spears. She came to you on the first night, proposing that you hook up for the cameras, and you turned her down because her offer made you feel sick to your stomach.

You feel worse, watching her thrash and gasp and bleed all over the Cornucopia. You've seen a man's cheek torn open by a fish hook, his lips flapping and his teeth showing through the torn skin, and you've made Emerald's face look like that, and everyone back home has watched you do it. So you don't watch her anymore.

You turn to the burly boy from Two--Shale Clarkson, who grew up breaking stones to gravel. During training, you all accepted that he'd be the leader of the Career gang, and you all immediately started plotting how to kill him in his sleep. He knows it, too, so you don't let his friendly smile take you in.

"Finnick," he says, grinning over the twitching corpse of the girl from Twelve. "Nice work, buddy!"

His father is a foreman, and his mother a past victor. Shale has grown up controlling people with handouts of praise; you get the feeling that praise is the only thing in short supply in Two.

"I guess it was all right," you say, and make a show of frowning at a break in your nail. He can't know, yet, how easy it was to use those knives, or how sick you feel about how you used them. You're not sure which is a strength and which a weakness, but you can't show either one yet.

The Career gang assembles where the Cornucopia opens, tallying bodies and divvying up supplies--Marcella and the boy from One quarrel over a scimitar, until he draws a knife from his sleeve and jams it between her ribs. You make a note of that: there's space in the uniform sleeve to conceal a wrist-sheath, and the boy from One is quick enough and canny enough to stow a knife there in the first five minutes. If he's concealed one blade on his body, there are likely to be more.

He'll be the one to watch.

There are seven bodies, at final count: Emerald, Marcella, the boys from Three and Five, little Sap and Springer from Eleven, the girl from Twelve. You don't mourn them; there's no point in the mourning. (You try to forget how Sap and Springer stood with their narrow chests puffed out and their hands curved ever-ready at their sides, the both of them so proud to be twelve years old and so afraid to die. _Little fry,_ your grandmother would call them. _Hardly worth the catching._ )

Granny Odair wouldn't speak to your father, after she heard that you were training up for the Games. You still don't understand why she's mad; she knew how many tesserae you'd be taking, anyway, so why did she care that you were preparing to even the odds?

She wouldn't speak to _you_ , either, after you decided to volunteer. _Fourteen is too fucking young!_ she'd screamed, and turned her back on you. She'd set her gnarled old hands to the task of grinding seaweed into flour, the way everyone does in Four to make the grain stretch, and she hadn't listened when you cajoled or raged or even when you apologized with tears in her eyes. She hadn't come to say her farewells to you before you boarded the train for the Capitol. _Too fucking young,_ you think, as you nudge Springer's shoulder with the toe of your boot.

You're beginning to wonder if she was right.

"I say we hunt down the boy from my district," says Cedar, the slim, grim-eyed girl from Seven. She wears her lank black hair in a pair of braids, one behind each ear, and she's hooked a pair of axes to her belt. She's not a Career, like the rest of you, but she's strong and swift and scored well in her individual session. You think that Shale is keeping her for the same reason he's keeping you: footsoldiers for now, easy pickings for later. "I saw him pick up a bow, and he'll know how to scale these trees like no one else. You let _anyone_ get up into the trees" the massive trees, twenty feet around and bare of branches for at least the first forty feet "with a bow, and we're dead meat."

You can't decide if she's trying to prove that she belongs by selling the boy from her district out--but whatever her strategy is, she's given you useful information. You have your spears, and you've picked up a coil of rope that you planned to use to make a net; you can tie it around a spear and fling it over one of those high branches, if you need to. You've been climbing since you were just a boy, and no one can shinny up a rope faster than you can.

Maybe Sap and Springer could scale that rough bark, but they're dead now, so you try not to worry about them.

The girl from Four will have followed that scent of salt and sulfur to the seashore, and a part of you longs to do the same. As though sticking your bare feet in the shallows somehow means going home again.

You shoulder your spears, feeling the balance of the hafts as you do. You know that you must look like a godling, swathed in your white tunic with blood staining your sleeve--you know that the sponsors are watching you, sighing over your wide green eyes. _The Games can't be won on sponsorship alone,_ Mags had said, _But they're a damn sight harder to win without it._ When you break away from the Career gang, they'll come howling for your blood, you'll have to rely on those little silver parachutes to help head off their vengeance.

It doesn't matter, really, who Cedar and Shale decide to kill first, so long as it's not you.

* * *

As night draws down, you crane your head up to the sky. Emerald's face surfaces first, as clean and perfect as it was before your knife carved it open. You force yourself to fix your eyes on hers until her face fades into Marcella's.

That night, you dream that a silver parachute descends through the trees to your hands--but when you reach for it, a hook catches under your sternum and yanks you into the sky.

* * *

The Career gang takes watches in twos, so you can't slip away on your watch; it would be suicide to try it when the watches change, when three of the Careers are up and alert. You lie awake, heart pounding, eyes wide in the darkness, waiting for a chance that never comes.

You begin to realize that you won't be able to escape fully equipped. You'll have to leave your rope behind, and one of your spears; the cooking knives, a flask, and a small medical kit are clipped to your belt, so at least it won't attract suspicion to bring those with you. (You wonder if they would notice you cutting away a length of rope to tuck under your tunic, but decide against it. The Career tributes aren't just keeping their eyes out for attacks on the gang; they're also watching for the slightest sign of dissent in the ranks. You can't afford to raise suspicion.)

"Off to the washroom," you tell Cedar, letting her hear the irony in your voice and waiting for her nod. The girl from Ten gives you an appreciative look as you go, but she says nothing to you, and you say nothing to her.

They'll realize in ten minutes or so that you're not coming back, so you've got to think. You don't know how to walk silently among the endless ferns, and you don't know where anything is in this forest--anything except the Cornucopia and the scent of the sea. You could ask your sponsors to supply you with a distraction (and you know full well that Mags has gotten you sponsors), but that would tip your hand too quickly.

What you need is the kind of distraction that could only be the Gamemakers'.

You've got to think. The Gamemakers would send in a wave or a fire or an army of muttations, if they thought you were boring the audience, but it's only the first day; the first eight deaths have probably sated the audience's taste for blood. No hope of an intervention, then. But the arena will be full of traps, waiting for someone to trip them--someone careless (like that poor bastard from Eight) or stupid (like you).

In the moon-cut darkness, you study the ferns, then the trees, searching for anything that looks out of place. Anything that a careless person, a stupid person, might try to use.

You see the moonlight touching the low branches of an evergreen tree. The _invitingly_ low branches. "Oh, you're not even _trying_ ," you whisper under your breath, and select the knife you like least from the bundle. You'll miss it, but it's worth more to you to lose it than to keep it.

When the knife sticks hard in the bark of the tree, you're already taking to your heels before the muttations burst from the branches. Some kind of insect, you think--there's a buzz of wings, a sort of chittering, chitinous sound--but you don't stay to find out. You crash through the ferns as fast as your legs can carry you. Your chest feels tight, and the spears clatter together where you've got them couched, but you take in deep gulps of air and thank fortune you've got the lungs of a swimmer.

Far away, a cannon sounds. Then a pause. Then a second cannon.

The Career pack is down to four.

* * *

You walk until dawn, putting as much distance as possible between you and the tributes who were your allies yesterday. When the first, grey morning light is slanting through the trees, you hear the soft sound of water pouring over stones, and you follow the slight dip in the ground to a narrow stream. There, you stoop to fill your flask, dropping iodine from the medical kit into the neck of the bottle to sterilize the water. Although the stream is clear and cold, by the time the water is safe to drink, it's gone tepid. You drink it anyway, then fill your flask again.

It's a start.

You're aware that you need to woo your sponsors, and you can't do that while you're alone. _Your greatest weapon is your charm,_ Agrippa told you, while he was arranging your hair into a corona of brazen waves. _So choose someone to charm._

You could have chosen Emerald, but remembering the way she'd put her hand to your bare waist and said you should fuck her for the cameras--your stomach still knots up, and it's not just because you remember how it felt to stick your knife in her eye. You knew then that you had to be a different kind of charmer: Sexy but completely innocent. The kind of boy people hate themselves for wanting.

You need the girl from Three.

She's one of the older tributes, just shy of eighteen; she has that pallor that's so characteristically Three, and straight, dark hair that she wears cropped close to her head. You watched her in training, the way you watched everyone else (and they watched you). She looked at you differently, though--not as though she was afraid of you, or with that naked want that you're learning to incite. When you met her eyes, she'd look away and blush at the very tips of her ears.

Her name is Node, and you know that if you're going to charm the sponsors, you have to charm her to do it.

Through the trees, you hear the cannon sounding. You can't be sure of whether this means that your opponents are up and ready to play, or whether some poor fool has set off a trap, but you remember what Granny Odair used to say when you watched the Games from her lap. _Blood in the water always stirs up the sharks,_ she'd remark, then she'd stroke back your hair with her fingertips. Whoever's dead, however they died, you need to move on.

You move on straight into a snare.

Like a fish twitched out of the water, you go flying through the air to dangle by the ankle from a space between two trees; your spears fall from your hands to the ferns below you, and you stifle a cry of pain. You're sure your leg has broken. You're sure you're going to die like this, hanging helpless from a length of braided vine, and all you can think is that it's not _fair_. You've trained your whole life for this; your mother missed meals so that _you_ could be sleek and fighting-ready, and your father trained you in the twilight after he'd done a long shift out on the water--they've given everything they had for you, and now you're going to _die_ and it's not _fair_ \--

The knives. You've still got the knives, hidden safely in the bundle at your belt, and even with your head pointed toward the ground you can reach them.

You let yourself spin from the vine, taking in the forest to either side of you, watching as the girl from Eight and the boy from Nine rise from the ferns. They've used the mud from the streambed to smear their tunics and their faces brown, fixing ferns to their shoulders and their hair to disguise them while they crouch. Now, they advance with knives in their hands, ready to slit you open (the way you sliced open Emerald and the boy from Three).

"Hello," you say, transforming a grimace of pain into your most winning smile. "Would you mind helping me down?"

The girl rolls her eyes. "It's Finnick," she says. "Finnick Odair."

"The rest of the pack must be close," says the boy. "Are the rest of the traps--"

"They're ready," she answers. She is looking down at her knife as though she's not sure what to do with it. She is close enough to touch, her upside down eyes level with your own. Her eyes meet yours as you sway, and you see fear there. She is _afraid_ to kill you.

You aren't afraid to kill her. Yesterday, you might have been, but today you don't even hesitate. While they are still nerving themselves up to slit your throat, you're drawing the fillet knife and raking it across her eyes. She screams, hands going up to the bleeding sockets, and by then you've flung the knife into Nine's gaping mouth. As he gags on blood, you twist up to cut yourself down; the serrated knife saws through the braided vines as though they were fresh bread, and you go crashing to the ferns below. There, your knife is waiting in Nine's throat, and you wrench it free to drive the into Eight's chest. She chokes wetly; you know that you've hit a lung.

You can make your escape while they're drowning in their own blood.

You feel your ankle. Sprained, not broken. If you can elevate it, that will be good, and if you can dip it in cold water, that will be better. First, though, you need to brace the leg. "I could use a bandage," you say to the air.

The silver parachute falls into your hands almost at once, but inside the parcel is something better than a bandage. It's a slim, black stocking with a tiny battery pack sewn at the cuff, and when you touch the button on the pack, the thing freezes hard and cold from heel to knee. You never saw anything like this back in District Four.

A cold stocking like this must have cost a fortune, even on the second day of the Games. Some Capitol admirer, you think, who liked your face as you rode through the streets in your chariot; some old man or woman who has too much money and no one to spend it on--no one but you.

"Thank you," you say to the sky, to the cameras, to your admirer. You are sincerely grateful, and you want them to understand that somehow--but as long as your life is in their hands, you can't be sincerely anything. And your life will never stop being in their hands.

A cannon sounds.

You need to get moving.

* * *

The stream leads you down to the sea; you follow the spine of the hill beyond it, always keeping that line of silver to your left. At first, a sharp pain shoots up your leg with every step, but gradually the ice-and-heat cycling of the stocking brings the pain down to an aching emptiness. When you emerge from the forest, you find yourself on a jutting grey cliff that overlooks a strip of rocky shoreline. Beside you, the stream cascades in rills and falls down the cliff face, then snakes through a nest of reeds to the waves below. By now, a light rain has begun to fall--the raindrops catch and freeze on your stocking, only to melt away again when the ice cycle ends.

Through the drizzle, you can make out a small spit of land that juts into the water. It's below the high-tide line, but a copse of dead trees clings to the salt-soaked earth; the spit is grown over with seagrass. When you squint into the rain, you can see the last wisps of smoke seeping up through the trees.

That's where she'll be: Cara Fetch, the girl from District Four. It's where you'd be, if you were following your heart to water.

You could probably kill her now, if you wanted--or when she goes to fetch water, you could hurl a spear through her heart and then fillet her like a fish. For a second, you allow yourself to imagine spilling Cara's guts over the stones, the way you'd cut free the guts of a cod; in the privacy of your head, you watch her eyes go cold and glassy.

You could never do it. If you did it, then when you go home, you'd have to watch her little brother screaming and calling for your blood; you'd have to watch her mother's eyes slowly turning smooth and reflective as the summer sea. You can just about bring yourself to kill Cara Fetch today, on this shore, but you're not sure whether you could kill her whole family slowly on another.

Maybe that's what makes you different from the people in the Capitol. You can nearly stand other people's suffering, so long as you don't have to see it; they can't stand to miss a single moment of another person's pain.

You can make your camp here, for now--just under the shade of the trees, where the high ground will give you the advantage over anyone coming to the stream for water. You have your spears and your knives, and your cold stocking to take away most of the pain of the sprain; you could do worse than to camp here while you recover.

The rain begins to ease, although the sky is still a leaden grey. The tide is beginning to come in, the surf licking the low rocks of the spit where Cara Fetch is camping. She will be stowing her gear in the trees now, the way you would, but she'll have her feet in the soothing salt water. The way you would.

You are on the cliff, though, and so you see the strange, shimmering lights beneath the surface before she does. You watch them slowly converging on the spit as the tide sweeps over it, and in your bones you know that no natural predators converge the way these creatures do. If you cried out to her to run, she would run; you could save her life.

Why don't you say something? Why don't you call to her? She's going to _die_ , and you're not even going to call out to her--

When the screaming starts, you're shaking.

 _It will hurt,_ Mags told you; her words surface through the screams, and you cling to them, because they're the only sane thing in the world right now. _It will hurt, but you can't sacrifice yourself for her. She wouldn't sacrifice herself for you, either. One of you's got to make it back._

The cannon fires, and you watch as the hovercraft appears to pluck Cara from the sea that had sheltered her. As she rises into the air, translucent, glowing creatures fall away from her like a curtain.

Jellyfish, you think. The height of irony, for a District Four girl to die in the one place where she thought she was safe.

No.

No. You've got to think. It's not irony; it's a _game_ , and if it's a game, then there are rules. Cara Fetch had sheltered on that rocky spit, where you would have sheltered, too, if you hadn't seen her smoke. The boy from Eight fell with six tracker jacker stings in his skin, because he was foolish enough to pluck the black raspberries that coiled so invitingly beneath the massive trees. (Even if he hadn't, Cedar would have flung her axe into his back; from the very beginning, the boy was marked to die.)

You remember your knife-point fixing in that low-boughed tree, and the chorus of chittering that rose up behind you as you ran.

This is a game. There are rules. And the first rule is, _You are most in danger where you think you are safest._

* * *

When the jellyfish recede into the deeper waters, you circle wide of the cliff and go down to the shore. The cliff will not be safe. You know this because it looks like the safest place in the arena. As you pick your way over the wave-smoothed stones, you try not to occupy yourself with what traps will be hidden on that inviting cliff face--a rockslide, triggered by an unwary foot; snake-mutts that slither from the cracks at night; vines that twist around you and trap you to die of starvation.

You're starving, and you aren't sure what food you can trust. In the shallow pools left by the departing tide, you spear yourself a fat, wary fish, but you slice off chunks of precious meat to drop into the pool. Only after another fish has nibbled at the meat do you give in to your hunger and finish its brother-fish off.

The guts lie beside you as you gnaw the life-warm meat. You don't look at them.

You can't stay by the water, tempted as you are. The Career gang may be looking for you, and if any of them can smell the sea on the air, they'll look here first. And even if that weren't the case, you have to find Node.

Did she see you ram your knife into her fellow-tribute's throat? Would she care, if she saw? _One of you's got to make it back,_ Mags had said. Your only responsibility is to make sure that one is you.

When you have a string of fish slung over your back, you step into the forest again. Your right leg is throbbing in a hollow, aching way, even beneath the cold stocking, and your right foot comes down hard and heavy on the twigs and fern stems that litter the forest floor. The crashing is probably attracting every other tribute in earshot, but there's nothing you can do except find a safe place (but not _too_ safe) to hunker down while you heal. You grit your teeth, brace yourself on your spear as though it's a walking stick, and keep moving.

Once, just once, you see another tribute. He's an emaciated boy, his soaked tunic clinging to the hollows beneath his ribs, and he takes in your limp and your stick with a battle-hungry smile. He meets your eyes from across the stream--even in the dimness, even across the valley, you can see murder in his eyes. He comes at you with his sword drawn, and you heft your spear to throw--

He gives a sharp yelp, and then he's springing into the air to dangle between two trees.

Of course. Eight and Nine's traps.

Your spear takes him through the gut before he can cut himself down. The blood pours out purple-black, spilling over his tunic and his chin to sting his eyes. He screams, screams and screams until your whole world is his scream; even when the cannon fires, you can still hear him screaming.

You once knew a pair of boys who tortured a cat to death, and it made a sound like that. You took the poor creature to Granny Odair, whose gnarled hands knew how to fix everything, and it had licked her thumb once and then died on her kitchen table. You can't stop thinking about that cat, and how you sobbed and begged her to fix it, and how it had screamed.

 _Take it to the sea, and let it go,_ she told you. But you can't take this boy to the sea, because you killed him, and the hovercraft has come to seize his body and hoist it into the air.

As you watch, you catch sight of a silver parachute drifting down through the trees. It falls just down the slope from you, and you crash through the ferns to pick it up.

 _Pain reliever_ , the bottle says. It feels like a joke. "Thank you," you say, as though by rote. You know that someone paid dearly for this, and that you should be grateful, but you don't want to be grateful right now. You can still hear the screaming, even though the boy's body is gone.

His body, and your spear. You muster a smile for the cameras, trying to be the cocksure creature that they want you to be and not the scared little boy who cried over a cat. "Thank you, sponsors," you say, flashing your teeth at the invisible crowd, "And if you're listening, I could really use a decent trident."

* * *

That night, seven faces light up the sky. Through the trees, you can make out Cara's bright red hair.

You dream that shy, dark-eyed Node turns into a cat and leaps for your throat.

* * *

When you wake, you make a small fire in the shadow of a rocky outcropping, where the smoke will gather. There, you begin smoking your fish so that they will keep as you travel; your clothes are still damp enough to chafe, so you peel off the stained tunic and leggings and let them dry by the fire.

Almost at once, a rain of parcels falls at the mouth of your cave: a little mesh bag of oranges, new batteries for your cold stocking, replacements for your missing knives, a bundle of oven-fresh bread. You can't help breaking into a grin at the shower of presents, and you tear into the bread first, while it's still hot. "I'll have to take off my clothes more often," you tell the air, laughing, and you can almost hear the people at the Capitol laughing along with you.

It wouldn't work if you gave them a show tomorrow; they would feel betrayed, maybe even disgusted, at the fourteen-year-old boy playing sexy to stay alive. Agrippa was right--you can be as sexy as you like, but it's your innocence that will make them open their hands and their hearts to you.

You eat an orange, then stuff the remainder of the bread into the mesh bag. The knives slide into the bundle, handles catching over the reinforced linen straps that keep the knives in place.

Then it's time to do what you've been dreading. You roll down the cold stocking and examine your right leg.

The stocking has reduced the worst of the swelling, but the right ankle is still visibly thicker than the left. The skin is taut and shiny, a little puckered where your boot kept the stocking from dissipating moisture; there are bruises where the vine had wrapped around your leg, and a thick line of purple blood from your heel to the arch of your foot. _Dead blood_ , your father called it, when he treated sprains. He's as brusque as your grandmother, but he has the same salt-tough healer's hands.

They'd tell you not to walk on it, but you can't help walking on it, so you dry the cold stocking by the fire and replace the batteries. Then you take two painkillers, wash them down with a mouthful of water from your flask, and pull the stocking on again. The leggings come next, then the boots.

You've just belted your tunic when the arrow glances off the stone, only inches from your head.

You reach for your spear, but the last spear vanished with the boy from Ten. You have only your knives; there's a sturdy boning knife that will do for a throwing knife. Even before you catch sight of him, you know that the archer is the boy from Seven. The one Cedar had wanted to hunt down--you don't know how, but he's found a way into the trees. Your eyes go up, up, up, to where the branches radiate out from the trunks like the spokes of a wheel.

There. That flash of white. That's him. You can see him sighting along his arrow, but he's too far away for you to recognize whether his expression shows fear or hate or only concentration. Before he can take his shot, you send your knife screaming through the air.

The blade only grazes his shoulder, but it's enough. His shot flies wild, and he tumbles back from his branch to fall spinning to earth.

You wait for the cannon to fire, but the forest is silent.

It takes nearly five minutes for you to realize that somehow, the boy has survived his fall. If you were a kinder person, a better person, you would go to him now and end his suffering--but all you can think is that Cedar was hunting him, and she'll know better than anyone else how to find him. She'll be close, so you have to go _now_.

As you gather up your mesh bag and your smoked fish, you run through the survivors in your mind. Yourself and Node. The remnants of the Career gang: Cedar and Shale and the boy from one--what was his name?--Chrome. The girls from Five and Nine, the boy from District Six. That makes eight.

You're in the final eight.

* * *

Dusk is just beginning to set in, rosy and humid after a grey day, when you come across the remnants of a campfire. It could be anyone's fire, you think at first--anonymous ashes in a nondescript depression in the earth, the ground scattered with a bird's bones picked clean of meat.

Then you find the battery and the frayed wire, which tell you two things: that this is Node's camp, and that she will be returning to it. No one else would think to start a fire with electrical sparks, and no one canny enough to start a fire with sparks would leave that precious battery behind.

You curl yourself into a hollow in the tree, the mesh bag nestled behind your feet and your knives ready. You're nearly sure that you can charm Node into an alliance with you, but you don't know how many of the sixteen she's killed. You don't know if she, like you, has learned to put herself aside in order to be the kind of person who can win the Games.

The sun slowly sinks. In the darkness, you break soft bread that tastes nothing like salt and seaweed--delicate bread from the Capitol, light as air. A cannon fires, somewhere in the distance, but you scarcely even jump at the sound.

Only two dead today. The audience will be getting bored; for all you know, they're already bored. How long can you keep their eyes on you? How long will their love for you last?

"Finnick?"

 _That_ makes you jump.

"Finnick, it's Node." You can't see her, can't even make out where her voice is coming from in the darkness. If she wanted you dead, she could have killed you already.

"My reputation precedes me," you say, with a forcedly cheerful smile.

"The smell of fish, actually." She gives a little laugh, dry and rough-edged. "You're from District Four. Who else could catch fish the way you do? Now that ..."

When she breaks off, you remember that she and Cara had been--not close. Friendly, maybe, if anyone can be friendly in the Hunger Games. You remember how Node had smiled in your direction, and you wonder, now, how many times that smile had been meant for Cara.

"She was a good--a good person," you say, and you're aware of how insufficient it is to say that. "Her father died in a storm, six years ago; he went out too far and never came back. She has a little brother named Hal. Halyard Fetch."

Node must have followed your voice, because her hand finds your shoulder in the gloom. If she wanted to, she could kill you right now.

Instead, she tucks her head against your chest. She is slim, and shorter than you are; she doesn't feel three years your senior. When you run your hand down her back, you can feel every knob of her vertebrae. You raise your hand to her close-cropped hair and find it greasy beneath your fingertips, but you stroke it anyway.

She doesn't sob or scream or beat your chest. She only cries, silently, until her tears run out.

* * *

You don't dream, that night. You don't sleep. You lie between the roots of the tree with Node in your arms, and in the scant moonlight that breaks through the clouds, you keep watch.

You must have dozed off at some point, though; you know because you wake, and there is a silver parachute spread over the ferns at your feet. Beneath the fabric, you find a trident, each prong sharpened to a perfect point.

* * *

The next day is quiet. You share your fish and oranges with Node; she lights a fire with her wire and battery, and she does it more quickly than you could by rubbing sticks together. With low-growing vines and ferns, you weave a screen to diffuse the smoke from your fire. That screen will be your blanket tonight.

Node has little to say. No cannons fire. You have time and space enough, here, to rest your leg and heal.

You sleep in turns, a few hours at a time. While Node sleeps, you gather the vines that creep up the nearby trees, slowly knotting them into a sturdy net. You find yourself humming a song that your grandmother used to sing as she mended nets--a wedding song, she said. The song that her sister sang when your grandmother married Carrick Odair.

 _The water is wide; I cannot cross o'er  
And neither have I wings to fly  
Give me a boat  
That can carry two  
And both shall row, my true love and I._

When evening falls again, Node crushes your oranges for juice, and the two of you scoop the pulp from the skin with your fingers. You raise your brows suggestively at her as you lick the sticky juice from your fingers, but she only laughs that low, rustling laugh and calmly licks her own.

At dawn, you hear the cannon thunder twice in quick succession. You can't know whether some poor bastards have sprung a trap, or whether the Gamemakers are bored with watching you and Node play nice, or whether Chrome has finally turned on Shale and Cedar the way you always expected him to. You only know that it's the fifth day of the games, and there are five tributes remaining.

You look over to where Node is curled up, her palm beneath her cheek and her lips quirked in sleep. The moment when you'll have to kill her is rapidly approaching, but she can't know that yet. The cannons didn't wake her, so you don't wake her, either.

You charmed her, and your sponsors gave you a trident, just ask you asked. What will they do if you end her life? Will they realize that you were never the innocent that you pretended to be, and cast you aside? Will they clutch their breasts and coo at the poor baby who had to put down the only person he could trust?

You know that her death will have to come last. You are putting together a story, just as the Gamemakers are, and you are that story's hero; you know that her death will have to come last, when it will matter most.

Node shifts in her sleep, lips drawing thin and brows pulling together. You stroke her hair until she stills again.

You can't forget the first rule of the game. _You are most in danger where you think you are safest._

* * *

When Node is ready to set out, you shoulder your mesh bag and roll your cold stocking back on. You've let it sit aside for the last day and a half, to save the battery, but now you'll be walking again, and you need the ice and the brace of it. "Your sponsors must like you," she says, eyes flicking from the bag to the stocking to the trident in the crook of your arm. "Not that I'm complaining."

"I'm a likable guy," you answer, but she isn't buying it, so you just laugh and let her lead the way. She goes barefoot on the soft needles of the forest floor, placing each step as carefully as she'd place a wire. Testing for traps, perhaps, but she looks as though she's dancing through the ferns. You've given her a heavy boning knife to carry, and she holds it before her like a prop. When the sunlight breaks through the clouds, she always tucks it into her sleeve again.

You recognize, after the fourth time she does it, that she is trying to keep its gleam from drawing unwelcome eyes.

The two of you go first to the stream to refill your water bottles; she has a bigger bottle, but you have the iodine drops, and she sighs in relief when she sees you draw them out. "I keep thinking I'm going to get some kind of parasite and die," she confesses, holding out her bottle for you to sanitize. "But that's a stupid thing to be afraid of, isn't it? In the Games?"

"Not stupid at all," you tell her. "But you're not likely to die from water-borne parasites. Just likely to be really unhappy for a month or so."

"I guess you'd know," she says, "Since you're from Four."

"I know because my grandmother takes care of people," you answer, and feel a pang as you say it. She's probably watching you right now, wondering when you're going to stick your trident into this sweet girl from District Three.

Soon, you hope.

From the forest uphill, you hear a crashing sound--not the sound you make as you drag your sprained ankle over the forest floor, trying and failing to quiet it; this is the sound of a body in full flight, running the way you ran from whatever you released that first night. You turn your head at once at the sound, but Node is already looking, already frowning. "There's more than one," she says. "And they don't ..."

She can't finish, but you feel a cold spike of fear in your gut, and you understand. _They don't sound like humans._

"Mutts," you answer, and pain lancing up your leg with every step, you bolt for the trees.

No. For the _tree_. You're at the stream, close to where you killed the boy from Seven; you have to trust that he planned to come _down_ somehow, and if he could get down, then you can get up. Whatever is chasing that other tribute, you have to hope that it can't climb these trees any better than you can.

You know you've found the right tree when you find his bow, lying broken among the ferns. It must have snapped when he fell. You circle the tree, searching for whatever it was he used to climb--for a rope, a ladder, _anything_ ; Node is looking to you, _trusting_ that you have a plan, but her eyes are so wide that you can see white all around the irises.

There.

There--a slender spike, driven deep into the wood. You pull hard at it, but it holds your weight, and you drop your trident and net and scrabble up the bark until you can get a foot on it. There's another spike after it, and then another, spiraling up the trunk of the tree, and so long as you press yourself flat against the trunk, you can climb it. You can hear Node hauling herself up behind you, and you shuffle up the neat circuit of spikes until she has room to climb to shelter.

She's barefoot, you remember. The spikes will be driving into her heels and her arches, all unforgiving iron.

As you cling to the side of the tree, fingers gripping the thick ridges in the bark, you hear an unearthly howling below, and then a girl's scream. You both know that whatever you're enduring up here is far better than what's below.

You keep your cheek pressed against the tree, and you don't look down. You know you wouldn't like what you see.

After the cannon fires, after the hovercraft comes and disperses the howling creatures, the clouds break open overhead. The bark grows slick, and the spikes will be slick, too. "We should get down," you say.

"Not yet," Node answers, teeth clenched. "Not yet, Finnick. I don't want them to eat me."

"Nothing's going to eat you," you say, but she doesn't move, so neither do you. Your hand cramps, and your legs ache with holding your position, but you don't move until Node begins to inch back along the spiral of spikes.

You don't talk about what you heard today. You just pick up your trident and your net, offer Node an orange, and sit at the foot of the tree until the rain breaks.

* * *

Three faces light the sky, washed out by occasional flashes of lightning. Shale. The girls from Five and Nine. "Her name was Alice," Node says, and you don't know which girl she means.

"Just Cedar and Chrome left," you answer. She shakes her head, and you clarify, "The girl from Seven. The boy from One."

"And then it's just us," she says.

You can't say anything to that. She understands, just as well as you do: Even if you can outfox Cedar and Chrome together, there will come a time (and very soon) when you'll turn against each other.

* * *

Four left. You tell yourself that as you finish off the oranges in your bag, readying your net for your enemies. Will Cedar and Chrome still be working together? Shale died, and Cedar is still alive, but that doesn't necessarily tell you anything. You can't know what happened to him, or why Cedar is still alive, or how Chrome was involved.

You can't know anything except that Node is beside you, trying to light a fire with wood too damp to catch, and you're going to have to kill her before you can go home. You've trained your whole life for this, but none of your lessons has prepared you to kill a girl who's cried against your shoulder and laughed as you licked orange juice from your fingertips.

"Maybe they'll call us to a feast," she suggests, half-hopefully. "No offense to your fish--it's really _good_ fish--but I wouldn't even mind if the other two killed me, so long as I got a leg of goose before I went."

"We're probably nowhere near each other," you answer. "If we don't start moving toward them, the Gamemakers will find a way to bring us all together."

"I guess that's true, too," says Node. "I haven't seen them interfering very much. That's weird, isn't it? Don't they usually throw more at tributes?"

You think about telling her that they don't have to throw anything at this year's tributes; the tributes will throw themselves willingly into the jaws of death, never imagining that they're in danger. You think about telling her how Cara Fetch really died, and how the jellyfish fell shimmering to the water below when the hovercraft took her up. "We're only a week into this," you answer, and hope that satisfies her.

"Short Games."

"Short Games," you agree, offering her the smile that Agrippa told you was a prize-winning smile. "It would be a shame if I didn't get to use my shiny trident."

The corners of her lips turn up, but her eyes still have a hollow cast to them. She puts the wire and the battery back into her pouch, giving up on the fire at last.

A silver parachute falls at your feet, with a covered bowl fixed to it and two spoons latched to the lid. You peel the lid back, feeling the heat of it beneath your hands, and you're hit with a smell like no other--a smell that says _home_ , more than the sulfur smell of the sea.

"What is it?" Node asks, and you tell her, "Chowder."

Granny Odair's chowder. You know it's hers because the chowder from the Capitol is cream-rich and bursting with meat, but this is a sprinkling of shredded fish and shrimp, part of a potato and seaweed thickener to make the milk stretch. You know it's hers because it _smells_ like hers, and it must have cost the whole district a fortune to send, and for a second you can't breathe because if you breathe you're going to start sobbing.

You take one spoon, and Node takes the other, and between the two of you, you scrape the bowl clean.

"Thank you," you say, when you've composed yourself enough to breathe again. "Thank you so much, Granny Odair."

* * *

You know that you and Node will be driven toward the other two eventually, so you start toward the center again, using the slant of the sun and the scent of the sea to guide you toward the Cornucopia again. Node has cut the sleeves from her tunic to wrap her feet, which the iron spikes have rubbed raw; she still holds her knife before her as though it's guiding her, but it's no longer guiding her through a dance.

You can both feel how close you are to the end. Even with Granny Odair's chowder warming your belly, there's a cold weight in the pit of your stomach like an iron ball.

Node sees the Cornucopia first, catching the watery light in gleams of gold. She puts a hand out to halt you and gestures toward it with her knife, and you sight along the blade to the clearing where you began only a week ago.

You're a different person, now. You feel as though you've lived an age since you first sprinted toward that golden horn. You should have deep grooves around your eyes and bracketing your mouth; your hands should be gnarled like an old man's.

At the cavernous mouth of the Cornucopia, Cedar sits honing her axe. Her eyes are trained on her whetstone, and you know that you could fling your trident and kill her and she wouldn't even have time to look up. It's not compassion that stays your hand--instead, it's the golden curve of the Cornucopia framing her like a photograph.

Like she's something that's meant to be seen.

You're not the only person who can make a pretty picture for the cameras, and no one in the arena has more training with pretty pictures than Chrome.

Before you know why you're doing it, you're whirling with your net in hand, and it catches on Chrome's knife and yanks it from his grip. You've got him tangled now, fingers twisted between knotted vines, and as he's raising his other knife to slice himself free, you pierce him through the chest with your trident. His eyes flash blue fury at you, and he hisses--his knife falls from his hand--his blood spurts over your tunic as you yank the trident free.

"I knew you were the one to watch," he tells you. Maybe he's saying it for the cameras; maybe he knew that one day you'd be standing over him just like this. You don't have time to wonder, though, because Node is screaming and you're turning to follow her knife once more--but this time, her knife is stuck three inches deep into Cedar's shoulder, and Cedar's axeblade is jammed between Node's ribs.

You lash out with your net as Cedar wrenches her axe from Node's chest to hack at her again, catching the head in a loop between two vines; Cedar screeches " _You!_ " and tries to draw her other axe, but Node twists her blade and makes Cedar's arm spasm.

Your trident plunges into Cedar's chest. She stands, tall and alert, mouth working with something you can't interpret. Searching for last words, maybe. Fighting for the breath to make an accusation.

She falls against your chest, clutching at your shoulders as she slides to the ground. Her eyes fix on yours and hold you there, arrested, while her blood soaks your tunic through.

You step back from her corpse when the cannon fires.

Beside you, Node lies prostrate on the ferns. "Hey," you whisper to her, with the smile that won you the stocking, the oranges, the trident. "Hey, Node. I'm here."

"Finnick?" she says weakly, stretching out one arm to you. "Finnick, I'm afraid; Finnick, I'm dying--"

"It's okay," you tell her, and you kneel beside her to touch her close-cropped hair. "I'll sit with you while you go. You don't have to be alone."

"I'm not alone," she answers, but she's almost too faint to hear. You lean in to her, and she raises her right hand to embrace you.

Her right hand, which still has the knife in it.

You feel the blade stick deep--too deep; you've forgotten the first rule, the _only_ rule, and you're going to die because of it. You cough, and your blood spatters her face. Your eyes must flash betrayal, because she's crying as her left hand strokes your face.

Your last hope is the same as hers. The same as everyone's--kill her, so that you can survive her.

You always knew that she would have to die last.


End file.
